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Keepin’ Busy

Hey gang, sorry for taking last week off – school and whatnot. I did, however, come up with an interesting little example for how things have been going. One I aim to share right here, right now.

Drawing class. I’ve drawn forever. Hell, I draw a webcomic that I just started up again. However, I knew that in taking an entry-level drawing class, we’d be doing the basics first. What I wasn’t expecting was how entry-level we were talking. Or how goddamn frustrating it would be. What are we drawing?

Paper.

Let that sink in for a little bit. We’ve been drawing paper, sheets of paper, laid out on a flat surface. Let me tell you, drawing that paper has been the hardest thing I’ve done in forever.

“But Joe, how hard is it drawing paper of all things? You draw dudes and what the hell else, right?” you ask. Well yes, I do, but paper is all about perspective. It’s about making sure that everything looks like it’s where it’s supposed to be, that it’s all the same size (all the sheets are the same size) and that they’re on the same surface. In other words, making it look like it’s paper on something instead of just drawing rectangles.

It gets frustrating, because it’s never what you expect it to be. You expect all the sides to be parallel? Huehuehuehue, little did you know that they’re not. That’s what your brain expects them to be, that’s what you know it really is, but you have to learn to trust your eye. It’s never perfectly parallel unless you’re standing right over it, straddling it, and staring right at the damn things. It’s less about learning how to draw paper as it is learning to trust your eye, to see how things fit together, how it all interacts with each other. It’s baffling, head-pounding stuff, but I’ll be damned if it hasn’t been an enlightening experience.

Crows’ Harvest is currently going through the “take explosion, make fit together” stage in that I’m writing out an outline, doing a synopsis, and taking out plots and subplots that don’t have anything to do with the story or simply weren’t going anywhere. At first I felt like it was a waste of time until I realized that it’s actually forcing me to see how it all connects. What the main points of the book are, what the major events need to be, what things need to be followed up on. Does it mean starting from scratch? Back to the drawing board? Sort of. But it’s necessary. It’s basic. But it’s a learning experience.